Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
I’ve hung up my Business Analyst hat today, having carefully and ethically removed the title from LinkedIn and updated several recent roles to highlight the many highly technical aspects I performed in them. I’ve worked with so many excellent BAs over the years and aspired to be like them, but I no longer feel that way and I can’t help being a little sad about that.
I’m a software engineer by background, and probably still one at heart. Ten years on from working as a full-time developer, I still love C# and regular open-source contributions have kept me very technical. A long-standing member of the spectre.console team has me triaging issues, reproducing bugs, writing documentation, submitting code and mentoring other contributors. I feel at home doing this.
I love the sharp intersection between the what and the how. Professionally, the most fulfilling engagements have been converting woolly business speak into high-level solutions and then drafting fairly well-defined user stories/software requirements. I enjoy getting down in the weeds, thinking about architecture, components, non-functionals, deployment practices etc, but never coding and never restricting the developers’ creativity with overly prescriptive specs.
The less enjoyable engagements have been spending 80% of my time ‘treading water’ with a client that fundamentally doesn’t know what their business needs/wants, who doesn’t want to do a proper discovery but somehow expects the technical team to figure it out. Even less enjoyable are those clients who profess ‘agile working’ but expect ‘fully signed-off, implementation-ready requirements’ ahead of hiring any developers and testers. Don’t laugh, they are out there, and they suck.
Some business analysts are genuinely good in these situations, patiently helping the business understand where their next capital investment should be. They really thrive doing the market/proposition/product analysis that’s required, and I really do applaud them. Unfortunately, I don’t thrive in that situation, and I never have. I get bored and then frustrated, finding myself continually championing a set of high-level business requirements without ever building anything.
I’m now a Systems Analyst, an apt title for a software developer who doesn’t code professionally. I can easily justify the change in job title if asked, and I will still apply for IT & Technical Business Analyst roles that involve a high degree of technical expertise and software requirements. It is novel to think, however, that some clients may now need to hire a Business Analyst before my work begins.